Apple Certified Mac Training & Technician

Keep Mac from going to sleep

Recently I was puzzled by a Macbook Pro that was going to sleep and shutting down applications after 10 minutes off inactivity. Even "Mouse Jiggler" or iTunes visualizer would not keep this Mac awake!

This was causing a real problem since Time Machine could not finish its back-up. Neither could I run my tools to do a OS X system cleanup and tuneup.

I checked these settings in System Preferences:

Energy Saver Settings

Desktop and Screen Saver

Security and Privacy > General

I also zapped various p-lists, rebooted the system etc etc.

Still the Macbook kept locking up after 10 minutes of inactiviry. :-(

Next step was the reinstall 10.7 Lion or even upgrade to 10.8 Mountain Lion. To avoid a catastrophic data loss on my clients computer I needed to image all the data to a secure drive first. Adding an other 3 hours to the repair time.

I went one more time back into the system preferences and had a deeper look. There it was right in front of me:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General > Advanced

Uncheck the box "Log out after 10 minutes of inactivity

I still upgraded to Mountain lion and did a System Tune-Up and manually re-arranged some data to complete the job.

Mac Tips & Tricks

To upgrade or not?Someone will be messed up and cry wolf on the internet. I guarantee it will happen, but these are always exceptions usually caused by problems that were present before the person upgraded in the hopes of fixing their broken system. So don’t worry. Just wait and give the developers some time to make the necessary tweaks so you don’t have to worry about them.

The Apple Watch is, first and foremost, an iPhone accessory. It might be even more than that eventually, a truly independent gadget, but a vast majority of its current functions like making calls, sending messages, getting information, even playing any third-party games.

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